The Tortilla Curtain

shore, but there was no shore here, there was nothing but-- And then he felt himself lifted up from behind by some monstrous uncontainable force and he dropped the gun and clutched at the frame of the stooped-over door of that pathetic little shack, staring in amazement into the lamplit faces there--his Mexican, that was him, at last, and a girl he'd never seen before, and was that an infant?--and the shack was spilling over on its side and floating up on the heavy liquid swell behind him until it fell to pieces and the light was snuffed out and the faces were gone and Delaney was drawn so much closer to that cold black working heart of the world than he'd ever dreamed possible.
    And so, in the end, it all came tumbling down on Cándido: his daughter's affliction, the _pelirrojo__ with the gun, the very mountain itself. The light was flickering, the rain hissing like a box of serpents prodded with a stick. _She can't see, Cándido, she can't see anything,__ America said, and in that moment he had a vision of his perfect plump little daughter transmogrified into an old hag with a cane and a Seeing Eye dog, and before he could assimilate the meaning of that in all its fearful permutations and banish it from his consciousness, there was this maniac with the gun, threatening his life, and before he could even begin to deal with _that,__ the mountain turned to pudding, to mush, the light failed and the shack fell to pieces. At first he didn't know what was happening--who would?--but there was no resisting that force. He could have built his shack of tungsten steel with footings a hundred feet deep and the result would have been the same. The mountain was going somewhere, and he was going with it.
    He didn't even have time to curse or flinch or wonder about his fate-all he could do was snatch America and his poor blind baby to him and hold on. America had Socorro pinned under her arm like a football and she clawed at him with her free hand as the roof shot away from them and they were thrown in a tangle on the pallets that just half a second ago were the inside wall and were now the floor. The moving floor. The floor that shot like a surfboard out on the crest of the liquid mountain that was scouring the earth and blasting trees out of the ground as if they'd never been rooted, and there was the _pelirrojo,__ the white face and flailing white arms, caught up in the mad black swirl of it like a man drowning in shit.
    The mountain roared, the boulders clamored, and yet they somehow stayed atop the molten flow, hurtling through the night with all the other debris. Cándido heard the rush of water ahead and saw the lights of the development below them, riding high on the wave of mud that hammered the walls flat and twisted the roofs from the houses and sent him and America and little Socorro thundering into the void. Then the lights went out in unison, the far wall of the development was breached and the two conjoined pallets were a raft in the river that the dry white wash had become, spinning out of control in the current.
    América was screaming and the baby was screaming and he could hear his own voice raised in a thin mournful drone, and that was nothing compared to the shrieks of the uprooted trees and the night-marish roar of the boulders rolling along beneath them. He wasn't thinking--there was no time to think, only to react--but even as he pitched into the blackness of this new river that was rushing toward completion in the old river below, he managed finally to curse the engine of all this misery in a burst of profanity that would have condemned him for all time if he hadn't been condemned already. What was it? What was it about him? All he wanted was work, and this was his fate, this was his stinking _pinche__ luck, a violated wife and a blind baby and a crazy white man with a gun, and even that wasn't enough to satisfy an insatiable God: no, they all had to drown like rats in the bargain.
    There was no controlling this thing, no hope of it. There was only the mad ride and the battering of the rocks. Cándido held on to the pallet and America held on to him. His knuckles were smashed and smashed again but he held on because there was nothing else he could do. And then they were in the bed of the big creek, Topanga Creek, and the mountain was behind them. But this wasn't the creek Cándido had drunk from and bathed in and slept behind through all those punishing months of drought--it wasn't even the creek he'd seen